The Internet's global and exponential growth is common knowledge today. The Internet is implemented using a large variety of connections between millions of computers. Internet access is readily available to individuals across the globe. Various on-line service providers, such as America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, Netcom, etc., use PSTN with modems or ISDN adapters for client connections. These on-line service providers maintain servers on the Internet providing client access to the Internet.
The recent developments on the World Wide Web user interfaces and information navigation software such as the Netscape web browser, coupled with a continuously growing number of public access providers, are making the Internet a fundamental component of the information age, if not the information super highway itself. World Wide Web sites on the Internet are typically accessible through a browser program which interprets scripts written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Users may browse the World Wide Web for virtually any kind of information, including information having content derived from one or more media, such as words, sounds or images. It is desired to enable the on-demand access to a variety of sources of media information using the Internet.
On the other hand, it is also well known that the current Internet is deficient, as compared to other existing networks, in the following three fundamental functionalities expected from a complete information network: 1) quality of service (QOS), 2) security, and 3) an easy and flexible mechanism to charge for the information and transmission services. These deficiencies discourage not only media providers from providing real-time on-demand access to media source information over the Internet, but also users who might otherwise desire to purchase real-time on-demand access to information held by such media sources. Although recent developments in the Internet Protocol (IP) and in Internet applications show promise for providing tools for secure transmission and real-time support, without a globally-agreed and implemented billing mechanism, guaranteed QOS over a global network is not possible. Consequently, none of these mechanisms can provide reliable, real-time global transmission employing the Internet today. One such service which may not be adequately provided by the Internet would be a request for delivery of a long video or audio segment. It may not be possible to have a guaranteed real-time delivery of such a long video and audio segment because one or more of the routers or computer links in the Internet may be busy handling other requests.
The existing telephone networks, on the other hand, have been offering the capabilities of guaranteed quality of service, security, and an easy and flexible mechanism to charge for the information and transmission services for a long time; the level of QOS, security and ease and flexibility of billing provided by existing telephone networks clearly surpasses the levels of these functions afforded by the Internet. What is desired is a practical way to utilize these advantages to provide guaranteed quality of service, security, and a charge mechanism for handling requests to access media sources that may be located by browsing the Internet.
Pending U.S. application Ser. No. 08/402,664 and U.S. application Ser. No. 08/648,260 have recognized these shortcomings of the Internet and the advantages of using a QOS network, such as the public switched telephone network, in tandem with the Internet to provide guaranteed quality of service, security and an easy and flexible billing mechanism. The present invention utilizes these advantages to enhance access to distributed media sources that are unbundled from or separate from the server architecture.